The moon landing was faked, 9/11 was an inside job, and George W. Bush assassinated JFK. You won't read these facts in standard textbooks, but conspiracy theorists the world over continually unearth evidence that have just enough factual basis to make you wonder. Conspiracies range from suspicious to irrational, usually involving some secret group working together to commit a wrongful act. Everybody knows that Dale Gribble guy who's obsessed in their abstract belief of what others hold to be historical accounts. They often point to obscure or vague documents or people that are nearly impossible to track down as the basis of their arguments. However, a true conspiracy is uncovered before the public frequently enough to keep the Dale Gribble's of the world hungry for the next piece of information that will blow the top off of accepted events.

X-Files fans will recall Agent Mulder's "I Want To Believe" UFO poster that hung on his office wall. That sums up the conspiracists' worldview quite well. There are those people who seem to be genetically inclined to grasp onto these far-fetched notions. They are a paradoxical breed; skeptical believers. They cannot accept accounts of events as they are presented once they catch wind of a conspiracy. They question every frame of the Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination, while seeming to reject Lee Harvey Oswald as the Occam's razor candidate.

The average history student could tell you that the Office for Strategic Services, which became the CIA, was founded in 1947 with J. Edgar Hoover as it's director, but it would take an Alex Jones or Jesse Ventura type to tell you that the agency conducted Project Paperclip following WWII, bringing Nazi scientists and intelligence officers to the United States to work for them. They could also tell you that they gave LSD and other experimental drugs to US soldiers to study their effects for mind control purposes as released with the MK-ULTRA information. A true conspiracist would go on to tell you that the CIA orchestrated the Kennedy assassination, pointing out memos known to have been in circulation around the office. They wouldn't stop there. You would also have to hear how they spread crack throughout black neighborhoods in order to incite them to kill one another and created the AIDS virus to wipe out gay men and African-Americans. I could tell you Hoover fancied wearing women's underwear, but what part that played in the great conspiracy I'm not sure I want to know.

Where do these guys come up with these very different accounts of history? It would appear that some, such as the limo driver shot JFK, were just made up. The sun glints off the mirror of the limo in the Zapruder film for a split second, in which someone decided that the driver turned, fired a gun hitting Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally several times, completely unnoticed, posted a video to Youtube, and accumulated followers who wanted to believe. Perhaps humans, the free will loving beings that we are, innately fear George Orwell's Big Brother government controlling our every move, knowing all our secrets. We are weary of the "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" warnings, ever searching for an impish old man pulling the strings unknown to us.

The Watergate scandal is accepted as historical fact now, but during Nixon's early presidency who would've thought the man in charge of running the country would be involved in breaking into the rival political party's headquarters to tarnish them? We can read historical accounts everywhere of James Earl Ray's assassination of Martin Luther King, but you have to dig a little to find that the FBI had unofficially labelled him as an enemy of the state, and have records of a letter they sent to him anonymously, informing him they had knowledge of an affair he was having, and implying he should kill himself if he didn't want to be outed and disgraced.

I have to agree with conspiracists' belief that we have a right to information. So many times our government has kept knowledge secret, sometimes for national security, sometimes maybe not. The Manhattan Project kept hushed about it's atomic bomb research, not acknowledging it's existance or it's 130,000 employees for over 25 years. It's not always a shadowy government conspiring against the public. Corporations are favorites among conspiracists. While the owners of Johnson & Johnson may not be promoting Satanism and KFC doesn't add an ingredient to make African-American men sterile to the Colonel's recipie, there are proven corporate conspiracies. Take for instance the case of Karen Silkwood, a union worker assigned to investigate health conditions at the Kerr-Mcgee nuclear plant in Oklahoma. When tested for contamination, it appeared that someone was trying to poison her with plutonium. When sent to Los Angeles for further testing, Silkwood was found dead in her car, the accident officially said to be caused by her falling asleep at the wheel.

Do we Americans in fact have complete free will, or are we just puppets of a Masonic-ran government from it's conception? Are Tupac, Elvis, and the real Paul McCartney sipping mojitos on a Middle Eastern beach resort with Michael Jackson? When you dig deep enough history certainly gives us reason to question what the mainstream media machine feeds us. Trust no one. If there is a shadow government firmly in place orchestrating the looming apocalypse, surely there's a yankee doodle Luke Skywalker hero among us who will uncover their plot and overthrow them. Or maybe he already has...